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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24108775">Nocturne for Quill and Ink</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon'>George_Pushdragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2006-11-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2007-07-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 00:49:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,552</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24108775</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Destroyed by the war, Harry thinks about Draco. All day. Every day.</p><p>(This story features pretty grim levels of depression and post traumatic stress.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Nocturne for Quill and Ink</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to kennahijja for beta work that was impeccably judged even by her usual high standards, Darklocket for an equally helpful (and lightning fast!) beta.</p><p>Thanks to The Eros Affair on livejournal that provided the inspiration and topic.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>1.09pm</b>
</p><p>The note is written in Draco's sharp-edged scrawl. Its steep downward slant suggests negligence, as if he'd written it while holding something more important in the other hand. It lies on the dining room table - a battered hulk of oakwood run aground against the wall between the windows that look onto the laneway. Draco has shoved back the debris of stained teacups, discarded letters and slag-heaps of old Prophets to make a bare border around the note, so it can't be missed. </p><p>Harry nudges the paper's corner to get a better angle and reads without picking it up. </p><p>
  <i>"Late appointment. <br/>Back around 7. <br/>For Merlin's sake, do something about milk &amp; bedroom window.<br/>And be in a fit state for conversation when I get back." </i>
</p><p>He's signed it "M". As if Harry might otherwise doubt who had left it. As if there were more than two people living in this house. As if Harry had more than one lover. When Draco signs his official correspondence at the Ministry, he writes "D Malfoy", with the "D" bold and fat and curlicued and his second name barely more than a line with knots in it until the final plunge of the "y". To the uninformed, it gives no hint of the author's family connection. But this "M", this stingy single letter, is just enough to be worse than nothing. Like a one-Knut tip</p><p>When he pulls the heavy curtains closed, the gloom floods back in. The falling fabric even makes a thump like a blown out candle. Leaving the note where it lies, he goes back to the bedroom. He makes a half-hearted attempt at rattling Draco's chest of drawers, which does nothing to dislodge the locking charm. He kicks at the pile of twice-worn clothes in the corner. There is nothing clean there. Harry gives up. It's a quarter past one. He gets back into bed.</p><p>The milk and the bedroom window, which Harry hexed into solid brick a few days ago when the kids in the house behind set up Quidditch hoops apparently with the specific intent of driving him crazy, are gone from his mind before his head has hit the pillow. The disorder in this house is carefully crafted. Strata of old junk have settled, one over the other, as the months washed in and out. Nothing here can be seen whole. Furniture and possessions - books and chairs, vases, photo frames fallen face down - are all reduced to random slivers and dissociated parts. The effect is the visual equivalent of white noise, and this is not exactly a co-incidence. </p><p>For two weeks Harry has not roused himself to go past the front door and he has no greater ambitions for today.</p><p>Voldemort has been dead for seven months and a handful of days. </p><p>
  <b>1.43pm</b>
</p><p>The bed, which is so familiar that it has taken on the smell of his body right up into the canopy, is not a haven for long. Even from the next room, the note in its deliberate clearing of blank wood provokes him. He pulls the covers over his head. At the edge of his mind, he guesses the source of Draco's complaint. </p><p>Harry has the luxury of absolute indolence. It makes the days unnaturally long. He sleeps. He dozes. He lets his mind wander and if the wandering turns unpleasant, he drinks. When he can rouse himself to it, he wanks. He avoids the kitchen with the clock in it but as evening approaches he finds himself counting the minutes until Draco's return with mounting frustration, and when the front door has barely clicked shut behind him, he has Draco thrown over the back of the couch and is tearing the clothes off him. If Draco doesn't exactly protest, neither does he give any unequivocal signs of enthusiasm. As Harry's efforts grow faster and louder, Draco draws even further into himself. These days he has a particular blankness of expression that Harry reads as a deliberate affront. It makes no difference either way. In less than five minutes after his first step through the door, Draco will extricate himself from under Harry's body and head for the shower. </p><p>If a ritual is a regularly recurring act which carries symbolic purpose, then this daily coupling is far from it. After it comes no feeling of cleansing. If Harry has drunk enough, he drifts into sleep on the rug and wakes in the early morning with a blanket thrown half-over him. If not, he lies there with the sweat cooling between his legs and in the roots of his hair and wonders whether another drink or another fuck might rid him of the empty feeling that is already returning. Evenings are unsatisfying, but at least the sound of Draco setting down his comb and his nail clippers on the bathroom sink is better than silence. </p><p>Draco works at the Ministry. The purpose of his job is not entirely clear to Harry, except that it keeps him above public suspicion. They are still sorting out the Death Eaters from the innocent bystanders, putting together briefs for prosecutions. Draco is some sort of intermediary between the Ministry and the Death Eater informants, arranging clemency in return for the right sort of confessions. Though Draco knows better than to discuss his work in this house, Harry doesn't fail to notice the evenings when he spends thirty minutes under the shower and spends half the evening staring at the wall. </p><p>The force of the Death Eater insurrection fell chiefly upon the Muggle world, and it is in the interests of healing that the broader magical community should not be burdened with too weighty a knowledge of its vilest details. Voldemort's signature, in his waning power, was slow and gruesome death, always by magical means. Casualties were found blinded, or with flesh grown over their mouth and nose, anklebones vanished and kneecaps and toes shattered from frantic efforts to run. Muggle nightmares came to life as their murderer used their own technology against them: lamp-posts stabbing their glass heads into footpaths; telephone boxes turned on their sides and tearing their jagged, lethal way along the street, everything from personal stereos to torn cola cans turned into killing weapons. As the end came nearer, Voldemort fought it with blood: pools of it that Harry still feels under his feet. </p><p>The last edition of the Prophet Harry had bothered to read, perhaps a fortnight after the end of the struggle, was full of letters declaiming the barbarity of the Death Eater campaign. Pantomime outrage, with adjectives like "inhuman" and "monstrous" jabbing at the air like fingers. But the chorus of disgust only obscured real comprehension. The lessons Harry learned were in the detail. The stoop of a man's neck as he begged. The ripe crunch of a skull being cracked. The snuffing of a life, as easy and quick as a sigh.</p><p>It is in the interests of healing that a few should bear these memories on behalf of the many. </p><p>
  <b>2.21pm</b>
</p><p>Harry has had half a year now to master the art of forgetting. He rolls onto his back, slides one hand behind his neck and the other beneath the sheet. He closes his eyes. Draco in a Kings Cross laneway. The air so full with impending rain it leaves a sheen on Draco's neck which traps the light. Draco draping his robe uncertainly over the wet railing beside him, where it slips and hangs tenuously. Draco with his face in shadow unbuckling his belt - and so what if it didn't happen exactly like that? The smell of old sick and garbage and the harsh orange light striking Draco's skin as Harry slides the trousers down his legs as far as they will go, until the linen trails in muck. The tightening of Draco's thigh muscles in the cold air. Draco with his forehead pressed against the grimy wall, slack-mouthed with need and murmuring: "Anything you want, Potter. Fuck me and I'll tell you anything you want." The first reluctant yielding of his flesh, the bucking of his hips and his fingertips ripping against the mortar. "Harry, fuck me, Harry, fuck me …"</p><p>After his orgasm comes absolute blankness. The windowless room lets in no sound.</p><p>Not all the details in this fantasy are false, though it blends earlier memories with much later ones. Certainly the meeting did take place, in the first winter after Harry left Hogwarts, in that same damp laneway. Before he let Malfoy make the plea he had come to make, Harry did confiscate his wand and run his hands over some of the more intimate and tender parts of his body, nominally in search of concealed weapons but mostly for the easy humiliation of it. Malfoy persevered grimly and offered his terms. There was something compelling about the new silences he had fallen into, dispensing words with caution where once he had flung them about as cheaply as snowballs. There was a subtle flattery in the way he filled these silences with a nervous glance that fled and flicked back to Harry, again and again. Helplessness looked good on him. So good in fact that Harry, distracted by larger concerns and the piercing headache he had borne for a fortnight since the destruction of the third Horcrux, made an excuse about needing time and proof and left him standing in the lane.</p><p>Draco's allegiances were obscure then, just as they are now. Conveniently, Voldemort's fall would come about before he was ever called upon to make public proof of his commitment. Having spent most of his life learning slogans, he turned his lips easily enough to the correct ones. Within a few weeks of his former master's defeat he was declaiming the tragic loss of Muggle life with an earnestness that bordered on sly parody. Only Harry sees how he pushes the few Muggle items in the house into corners or open drawers and, when he thinks them forgotten, destroys them. </p><p>It is two weeks now since Draco remarked, his voice sudden and hoarse in the bleak just-before-dawn darkness, that an acquaintance of his mother's had written to mention a vacancy at the European Wizarding Archive in Arles which might be suitable for someone with Draco's background. He said it as he kicked Harry's most recently shed clothes into the corner and pulled his robe off the hook by the door. After a judicious pause he spoke Harry's name to gauge whether he had heard. The question hung unanswered.</p><p>What has changed, since those first snatched meetings in shadowy laneways and peeling hotels, is the quality of Draco's need. These days, with the currency of six months' unblemished Ministry service and the reflected glow of coming home to Harry Potter every night, Draco can afford to indulge in indifference even if open defiance remains beyond his reach. The outside world must regard him as something of a tamed Chimaera, Harry thinks. On rare mornings Harry wakes early enough to see him dressing. He crawls down to the end of the bed to watch the tall rectangle of light from the bathroom doorway with Draco moving back and forth across it, combing his hair off his face until it's as slick and smooth as glass and then raking his fingers through it. On those mornings, as Draco runs his thumb over the folds at his cuffs and collar, Harry finds him hard to recognise under the civilised veneer. But Harry imagines the senior wizards of the Ministry giving a guarded nod as they pass Draco's desk, waiting for the moment he will bite, or sting, or breathe fire. </p><p>Only Draco has lost his sting. His old venom has got weak and weary. </p><p>"Still alive then?" he had greeted Harry with faint surprise and no trace of humour at their second hurried meeting - same laneway, early-morning damp in their hair. "And still next to useless. The war will be over before you do anything. But then I expect that's your plan, isn't it?"</p><p>The white flashes in the root of his eyes that had plagued him since the destruction of the fourth Horcrux slowed Harry down, but he still had enough furious strength to shove Draco square in the chest and send him stumbling backward. As he caught himself on the wall, Draco actually laughed. "Shame you don't have the balls to do that to Voldemort." </p><p>This is one of the few encounters from which Harry can draw no fuel for his fantasies. It is too stained with his state of mind then. Each Horcrux extracted a physical price - the dagger was the worst; discovering it too soon after the locket had nearly crippled him - but there were also the memories, Voldemort's bloodiest and most triumphant memories that escaped with each release of festering old magic. On bad days like that one he struggled to hold onto the thread of himself at all. In a strained voice he asked the unlikely double agent what he had to offer.</p><p>In the chill, Draco pulled his coat tighter and tucked his bare fists under his elbows. He answered with absurd confidence: "Absolutely nothing. You can't possibly think I'm going to give you information for free. When you've got something specific to offer me in return - starting with a pre-emptive pardon from the Minister - then we'll see what I have to say." </p><p>Harry spared him one glance of open disgust and Disapparated. His last glimpse as his vision dissolved was Draco's hand shooting out toward him. His fingers curved like fishing hooks. </p><p>Harry let almost a month go by before their next meeting, well aware that with each delay he came closer to Voldemort's defeat and the value of Draco's defection withered. On his way to that meeting, his head already swimming with the toxic memories from the fifth Horcrux, a fault on the tube plunged the carriage into darkness. As he groped for his wand he was sure he caught Bellatrix Lestrange's laughter nearby, and he knew with absolute certainty that death was upon him. With the blind panic and the fury came an unexpected revelation. </p><p>When the lights blinked on again to prove his fear ill founded, he knew what he wanted from Draco Malfoy. Three days later, in a grubby hotel off Caledonian Road, he got it. </p><p>
  <b>2.55pm</b>
</p><p>Harry cleans himself up and goes out to the dining room for the change of scenery. Unconsciously, he angles the couch before he slumps into it. It's the latest salvo in an ongoing battle. Every morning Draco arranges the two couches in parallel, in the wizarding fashion, and every afternoon Harry tilts them into two arms of a triangle to leave the vacant space where the television ought to be. Each time he does it, he remembers the Dursleys reclining in their armchairs like thrones and talking back to the newsreaders and thinks he will not do it again. </p><p>Behind him, he imagines he can hear Draco's note rustle and squirm on its carefully constructed stage. In the corner of the table is a stack of letters, invitations and unread petitions. Somewhere in the heap is the last letter that Arthur Weasley sent. He only remembers this because, twice now, Draco has moved it to the top of the pile where it remains unopened. After the treatment that Hermione's howler got, Draco no longer goes past this half-hearted prompting. There are still scorch marks on the wall. Harry feels he has won an immense personal battle with the world and no-one has called in person for weeks. Not even Ron.</p><p>Harry has learned to be most ruthless with thoughts like these. He draws one bare leg up against the back of the couch and dives back into the first fantasy he can bring to mind.</p><p>Draco took it coolly that day in Caledonian Road, struggling to look nonchalant as he perched on the edge of the low bed, his long legs bending up as it gave way beneath him. The stale Muggle smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains turned even Harry's stomach. He told Draco the terms on which his defection would be accepted - no pre-emptive pardon but a letter of acknowledgement. The additional condition of his own he left unstated. Draco hesitated. He flicked on the bedside lamp to scrutinise the letter. As he stretched the parchment out, his drawn back cuff revealed the skin that would bear the Dark Mark, if Voldemort were given sufficient time between the Horcruxes' annihilation to recover the strength to bequeath it. Under the aged bulb's yellowish light, Harry could imagine its ghostly form, the mark he had seen too many times that year, hovering over another killing field or imbuing his foreign memories with the smell of scorched flesh. It stood for the closeness of death. </p><p>Harry shrugged off his coat. Draco looked up quickly and followed his movements as he folded the coat on top of the rotting bar fridge and laid his wand on it. Then Draco understood that there was more. "You're as mad as he is if you think-" he snarled. Harry, who in his memories had seen Voldemort stand patient for minutes watching his prisoner work himself up into terrified sobs, understood how to wield silence. Draco's gaze slipped from the letter to his confiscated wand in Harry's coat pocket to where Harry's thumb hung just inside his belt buckle.</p><p>This is a moment Harry calls on over and over to fill these sluggish days. Sometimes Draco is reluctant and it takes a bodily struggle and a fat lip before Harry can pin him to the bed with his knees splayed and his breath gasping. Other times he has a quiet intensity as he seizes Harry's hand and guides it beneath his clothes. Curious or defeated or openly excited, Draco acts out this scene daily in his head. </p><p>The reality, when he remembers it, still makes his ribs tight. It was eerily quiet. The buses outside grew silent to magnify the intimate sounds within the room: the individual click of each tooth of his zip as he slid it down; the whine of the cheap mattress as Draco leaned forward; the dry swallow Harry gave as Draco's hands reached for him. Though he made himself compliant, Draco's shoulders jerked with unspoken scorn. Once or twice Harry thought he caught a flicker of curiosity in his supple mouth - but with his eyes closed it was impossible to tell.</p><p>Afterwards Draco drew himself up stiffly. He spat into the sink and rinsed his mouth. "Signed, sealed and delivered then," he observed coldly. "If you go back on your word, Potter, I'll kill one of your friends for every minute I spent here." </p><p>It was the last time he would threaten Harry with violence, but the ugly words inhabited the room after he had gone, sticking to the wallpaper like the mildew. Since that day, he has gained a wary confidence in Harry's character born of careful observation and constant testing; it is nothing so sentimental as trust. He has kept his habit of compliance, too. He stays.</p><p>Up until now there has been little in the way of alternatives. Though neither of them has said it, they both understand that accepting this position in Arles would set Draco on a trajectory that must lead away from London and from Harry. The geographical distance alone would be too much. But the European Wizarding Archive is also notoriously selective about the sort of history it seeks to preserve, and Draco's old beliefs have not been cured, only covered up. </p><p>
  <b>3.29pm</b>
</p><p>Harry's strokes speed up, but the slick sounds of skin on skin echo sadly. His arousal is dying. He is one man alone sharing a dark, unkempt room with papers which are windows onto a world he wants to banish. Lurking in the pile on the table behind him is another draft of Rita Skeeter's book on the fall of Voldemort, but he won't read it, and when the invitation to the launch comes, he'll burn it. Draco will go perhaps, if he is still here, with his serious, small mouth and his eyes cast down in regret, murmuring the right platitudes to the right people. But the book will be a pack of lies. The trouble was, he arrived too early, not too late. </p><p>He pours his first drink. He drinks bourbon for the sweet, slightly rotten smell that is so unmistakably Muggle it makes Draco's top lip curl every time his gaze comes to rest on the bottle. Judging by the stirring in his stomach it is mid-afternoon, but between him and the pantry lie the clock, the uncurtained kitchen window and the French newspaper on the bench left open to what is obviously the accommodation page. He gulps the rest of his drink and waits for the kick of it that will leave his insides numb. And in the meantime, he sinks back into reminiscence. </p><p>Harry viewed their first meeting following the official acceptance of Draco's defection as an uncomfortable necessity. He chose the venue for provocation value: a pub that was loud and filthy even to his own accustomed senses. His mind was becoming clearer as the damage from the fifth Horcrux healed, but it had not brought him any sort of remorse. Their hotel room encounter was just another disappointment, barely remarkable next to the struggle to heal Ron's stomach wound before he bled to death and the endless mopping up of Voldemort's latest victims. He waited, hunched over the end of the bar, and kept his hand on his wand.</p><p>Draco threw the hood of his cloak back as he drew up, already attracting the curious eye of the girl behind the bar. He ordered as if he had learned the words by rote. Slipping into an empty booth, Harry watched him negotiate the challenge of a ten-pound note, pint glasses without levelling charms, and the proximity of two dozen noisy Muggles. Draco manoeuvred his way through the crowd as gingerly as if the room were mined. As he slid onto the seat, breathing hard and encumbered by the glasses, he moved too far along, too close. His elbow dug into Harry's chest as he stowed the change in his pocket. </p><p>"What do you want?" </p><p>The answer was simple, or should have been. Harry needed to know whether the old fortress on the Isle of Drear was still being used as a Death-Eater meeting place, and when he might find it free to search it. </p><p>"Is that all?" Draco asked unflinchingly. "This time." Harry took a swig of beer and wondered whether to take that for an attack or an invitation. </p><p>There was a hand on his thigh. Beneath the table, Draco's hand. With one casual squeeze, he drew Harry's complete attention, then he slid his palm over the front of Harry's trousers and began to stroke. Harry's gaze flew around the room, as if Draco might have failed to notice all the people there. But the hand between his legs did not slow. Beneath the astonishment, Harry's body responded. All these months of Voldemort's barbarity had schooled him to steel himself against shock. He had not thought he could be taken by surprise any more. Yet here he was, the colour rising in him as he tore a coaster into ribbons while he let a Death Eater double agent calmly bring him off under the eyes of a room full of strangers. </p><p>His heart thumped like a fist against his ribs. He turned his darkening face to the wood-panelled wall and reached down to lay his hand over Draco's wrist. </p><p>Draco broke off and put his lips against Harry's ear. "Two days before the full moon they'll all be at a raid in the borders," he whispered. "You fucking sort this, Potter." Then he was gone.</p><p>At most, when his body is so spent with abuse that the memory alone fails to rouse him, he imagines it is Draco's mouth rather than his hand that moves beneath the table, or occasionally the war is over and he can drag Draco into a storeroom out the back and shove him up against the wall, but every other detail remains the same. The bald man arguing with his girlfriend by the door, a near miss in the football playing on the television in the corner, the fog of cigarette smoke hanging from the dusty chandeliers. He remembers how Draco's ankle casually hooked behind his beneath the table, and he comes. </p><p>
  <b>4.10pm</b>
</p><p>Under the blanket of numbness which his orgasm draws over him, Harry dozes in the armchair. He wakes to the thought that the memories he gluts himself on during the long day are old ones. With each re-telling, the characters in them seem more like stage actors. From the time they have spent in this house, while Draco white-lied his way into a Ministry career and Harry applied his formidable willpower to making himself a hermit, he recalls few moments worthy of fantasy. When was the last time Draco ventured anything that surprised him? Weeks. Months, perhaps, if he had better track of time. About seven months.</p><p>There had been later meetings, of course. Information was exchanged, but not only that. They talked sometimes, scarcely more than the bare essentials of betrayal since Harry refused to risk disclosing anything important and Draco quickly strangled any conversations that ventured towards taboo topics: chiefly his family, Dumbledore, and anything to do with Fenrir Greyback. These days, Harry would know better than to ask. Draco communicates in accusations and demands, barbing his sentences with <i>"you"</i> and <i>"they"</i>. When it comes to what really matters, the first person never shows. </p><p>Harry's memory holds on much tighter to physical sensation that to words. There was one encounter in the toilets of a bus station: a flurry of elbows and teeth and groping hands that is still so vivid it brings the taste of Draco's skin into his mouth. And another hazardous meeting, cut short on the brink of the destruction of the final Horcrux when his skull was so thick with the ghosts of Voldemort's memories that only the instant single-mindedness of sex could drive them out. After it, Harry sank onto the bench seat from which Draco had just disappeared and caught himself laying his palm over the slightly warm wood. </p><p>One memory comes to him suddenly. Draco laughing. In the master bedroom of Grimmauld Place, resting on the window sill with that old blue dressing gown Bill Weasley had left behind covering just enough skin to highlight the generous nakedness of all the rest of him. The moment seems so entirely alien that he wonders if it's lingering detritus from Voldemort's presence in his mind. But he must have been there. Grimmauld Place happened: those three becalmed days when the war had ended but the belief of it had yet to sink in. Three days when his world was as small and as simple the four walls of that master bedroom, and in it there was nothing but his body and Draco's and the furious challenge of finding new ways to bring them together. In his memory, Draco's laughter sounds easy, neither a weapon nor a decoy. Hadn't they reached a point where exhaustion and constant coupling had left them so stripped of artifice that each retreated into silence to avoid voicing anything they might regret? </p><p>
  <b>5.04pm</b>
</p><p>The fabric on the couch is coarse and what he longs for is the living warmth of Draco's skin. But there is an hour or more to go before the day ends and the Ministry building disgorges its occupants. Harry opens the curtains just enough to observe a fragment of darkening sky. Days like this it feels like it will be 5pm forever. He has hours of solitude left to him. Hours of wondering. </p><p>In the strife of the last two years, youth has invaded the Ministry. The files that Draco occasionally brings home bear names that Harry does not even recognise. When Harry pictures these newcomers, they have large, capable hands and the sort of virile confidence that can only be grounded in ignorance. Draco, he knows, is drawn to strength. </p><p>He still signs himself "M". The five unwritten letters are a deliberate withholding. Harry wonders what he would have to do to earn them.</p><p>
  <b>5.39pm</b>
</p><p>The day's meagre sunlight is gone, and Harry leaves the cooling room to pull Draco's dressing gown from its hook behind the bedroom door. Roused by the crisp smell of Draco's soap, he makes it as far as the kitchen. In the middle of the bench lies the French newspaper with a quill flung across it. Harry doesn't bother to find out whether any of the advertisements have been circled this time. He sweeps the lot into the sink, upends the bottom drawer until he finds matches and sets the lot on fire. </p><p>The first time he did this, it was morning before Draco discovered it and stalked, tight-voiced with fury, into the bedroom. The sudden light drove Harry under the covers, where he at first pretended not to hear Draco's snarled inquisition until the blankets were ripped away. Even then, his only response was a string of obscenities which ended the moment Draco drew close enough for Harry to seize his wrist and drag him onto the bed. Their bodies collided, and in that instant Harry's hostility vanished, subsumed like everything else into sex. </p><p>Draco fought fiercely. But Harry, though weak from sloth, was drugged with sleep and oblivious to whether he was causing pain. His hands and teeth latched onto any part of Draco they could reach. It took a desperate wrench of his shoulders for Draco to peel himself free and topple backward onto the floor. He picked himself up and stood a safe distance off, all the torn pleats at the front of his shirt shaking. Wordlessly, he jerked fresh clothes from the cupboard and left. </p><p>Alone in the room with one ivory button in his fist and his chest heaving, Harry screwed his eyes shut and, that day, did not make it out of bed at all, not even to cast the spell that bricked the bedroom window over for good.</p><p>
  <b>5.45pm</b>
</p><p>The scorched parchment and feather leave a foul smell in the kitchen, acidic like dead flesh. It makes him nauseous. He goes back to the dining room and to the bourbon bottle and fills the glass high. </p><p>Notwithstanding his professed contempt for Muggles, Voldemort was content to sink to the level of their most despicable members. Harry had never expected their final confrontation to produce a display of courage on the part of his adversary, but that was not enough to prepare him. </p><p>When he finally cornered the spectre formerly known as Tom Riddle in a church outside Ely, stooped and creeping like a wounded insect as the destruction of his Horcruxes took its toll, there were Muggle hostages. A dozen or more of them. It had taken the last of his power to get some of them airborne; when Harry arrived, two women were still clinging to the pews and resisting. The others were spread out along the nave, some fifteen metres up, dangling upside-down like macabre puppets from weak hovering charms. It was clear that the withdrawal of Voldemort's will would leave gravity to do its terrible work. Even an expert spellcaster could not hope to catch more than one. </p><p>Voldemort leaned against the altar and let out a hiss that was like the death of a laugh. </p><p>If there was a noble path to choose, Harry could not see it. He made the mistake, once, of looking up. A boy just old enough to be humiliated by tears was crying for his mother and turning pleading eyes to Harry, singling him out instinctively among all the others as saviour. Harry did not look again. He did what his destiny demanded: he acted. </p><p>Outside that room, with its smell of burst flesh and Voldemort's annihilation burned into the floor like a bomb crater, he walked in numb fury and he did not stop until he had Apparated his way to Malfoy Manor. He had not even managed to save one. When the House-Elves loyally swore that they had not seen their young master for over a year, he gave them no second chance before he began reducing the entry hall to rubble, then the staircase, then the portrait gallery, until finally out of the groan of cloven stone and the glitter of falling glass, Draco's black-robed figure appeared, cursing. As Draco strode forward, his white hair disordered with the fallen debris and his pupils wide and dark from whatever blind hole he had sought shelter in, Harry understood for the first time what he had come here for. Before Draco could speak, Harry wrapped one unsteady hand around his wrist and Apparated.</p><p>The first time he kissed Draco Malfoy was on the pavement outside Grimmauld Place, in the twilight, with their mouths still full of plaster dust. As Draco swayed from the unexpected Apparition, Harry seized his shoulders and lunged at him, just as his lips were parting to make a snarling complaint. It was a one-sided gesture, with no hint of tenderness except perhaps for the fact that Harry had thought to begin with a kiss at all. Draco held himself cautiously still. In the end, he began to struggle nervously and try to work his arms free of Harry's grip.</p><p>Harry let him go. As Draco steadied himself and glanced at the unfamiliar street, Harry hissed a hot-breathed sentence into his ear and watched his surprise as the hidden number twelve revealed itself. Only when they were inside, the door kicked shut behind them, did Draco appear to grasp that something was different. Between his kisses and his demanding hands, Harry found himself leaving patient intervals, longer and longer, as if inviting Draco to fill the lull with some response. As if, for the first time, they had the luxury of time. </p><p>Draco wedged his elbow between them for breathing room. </p><p>"So it's done. Is it? You'd better not have dragged me here -" Harry's hand over his mouth cut off his protest. The sudden stillness was dreadful. Harry's forearm twitched with the reverberation from the spell that had turned bricks into puddles and Voldemort's body into ash. Even the shadow of that memory, indistinct on the edge of consciousness, made Harry's stomach lurch up into his chest. His fingernails dug into Draco's jaw. </p><p>"Potter!" Draco snarled, and the nausea receded. The plaster dust deepened the lines of Draco's face, and all its angles shifted around steeply in displeasure. He looked haggard, and Harry tried to remember if that was unusual. He smudged his fingertip along the white trail down the side of Draco's nose. When he focused all his attention on following the meagre curve of cartilage, it was possible to let the words slip out of his mouth like bubbles, detached and meaningless. </p><p>"He's dead," Harry said. </p><p>Draco cringed very slightly as if, except for the hat-stand at his back, he would have put a few feet between them. Harry's mind was clear and focused with the force of adrenalin. He could see Draco's thoughts as if they were written: those two words had loosed the shackles of his obligations. He was free to walk back onto the street and leave Harry alone with his head packed like a coffin with Voldemort's memories.</p><p>Harry did something entirely unexpected to them both. He shoved his hands under Draco's robes, fisted them in the collar of his shirt and tore it down the front. In the echoing vault of the hallway, the sound was obscene. Beneath the shredded linen, Draco's chest shuddered in what could have resembled disgust if his excitement weren't also plain to see. The muscles across his abdomen flexed as Harry's hands ran across them. </p><p>The first time Draco Malfoy kissed him was in the hallway of Grimmauld Place, with the remains of his shirt slipping from his shoulders and the cloth-draped furniture lingering like ghosts in the gloom beside them. It was a guarded kiss but freely given. In fact, it was Draco who moved around behind him and slid off his cloak and then his shirt, draping them neatly over the banister where they would hang forgotten for three days and nights.</p><p>In the empty house, there was nothing to mark time's passing except the inconvenient hunger which drove them down to dig out crackers, dried fruit and tea from the kitchen. Other than that, the master bedroom held all they needed. Draco's slightly dazed look occasionally suggested he had never dreamed the world could contain so much sex. He was rarely completely sated; Harry never was. Even when their bodies were too raw to go on, Harry would take a sudden consuming interest in the arch of Draco's foot, or in the veins on the inside of his elbow, and set himself to studying them. </p><p>Harry remembers more about those three days than most of the ten months that preceded them. It was on the second step that the floorboard creaked each time Draco got out of bed to go to the window. To the left of the dresser, a dark rectangle in the pale green wallpaper marked the old site of the portrait that Harry had exiled to the wardrobe as soon as he detached himself from Draco's neck long enough to notice it. The pattern on the bedlinen and the curtains Harry could draw from memory even now. Whoever chose the absurdly feminine forget-me-not print could not have contemplated that one day Harry would spread his broken-nailed hands out upon it as he let Draco take him from behind. </p><p>There came a point where the gesture of reaching out for Draco's body was instinctive. He did it in deep sleep. He did it an instant before his mind became aware of the first stirrings of desire. He did it every time memory threatened, which was less and less often as the days passed. One afternoon, sitting at the end of the bed against the bedpost, he found himself watching Draco again as he dozed with the sheet flung off in irritation. The high cloud outside took the dazzle out of the light and shone it with unforgiving clarity into the room. It showed all the stains on the linen. And the critical lines between Draco's eyebrows that belonged on an older man, the spare muscle of his arms, the scar on his chest, and the sheen of his lips which were split with too much sex. He couldn't be more naked with his skin still on. Harry thought: Come away with me. He regretted it, and obstinately thought it again. Tentative visions came to him, as isolated and out-of-context as postcards, of hotels in Alexandria and cabins in Romania. His chest felt heavy with unexpected hope. </p><p>Then Draco stirred to scratch his belly and, without opening his eyes, caught Harry's ankle and dragged it towards him. Harry laughed, complying, and forgot.</p><p>The knock came soon afterwards. One brisk rap on the front door, then repeated. Harry put on the old blue dressing gown and went down. On the front steps stood Remus, and behind him, hazy on the wrong side of the veiling wards, a handful of figures waited. </p><p>"You did it," Remus said quietly, his eyes moist. "We found his - oh, Harry!" </p><p>Remus's arms around him were as heavy as brick. The wind climbed up his legs and stripped away the layer of mingled body heat he had carried from the bed. He shivered as the waiting group stared at him. Their lips were strung like bows already. The questions would soon be loosed. </p><p>"It's all over," Remus whispered. </p><p>On the stairs behind him, Harry heard bare feet ascending and then the closing of a door. </p><p>
  <b>6.13pm</b>
</p><p>The sun has gone down. He pours another drink. Reflectively he holds the glass up to his eye. It tints the room with sepia light, aging it. He empties it into the rim of a candleholder and upends the glass over the bottleneck. Before another unwanted memory can take hold, he fixes his mind on fantasy. Draco leaning against the kitchen table at Grimmauld Place. Draco shrugging off the dressing gown and letting it fall. Draco draping himself slowly across the tabletop with his arms stretched above him. Biscuit crumbs and a drop of jam on the wood beside his left hip, a used frypan on the bench and the kettle still steaming faintly. Draco's gaze intent on Harry as he draws his feet up onto the table. Harry's grip reaches all the way around those narrow ankles as he leans his chin on Draco's raised knee and looks down at him. It is a long time before Harry moves. Draco has finally done the unthinkable. This kitchen has been purged of its memories. Molly Weasley never ruled over this place, never overcooked the sausages while she fretted about her children's death. Sirius and Snape never picked each other to pieces. Banished from here are Ron and Ginny, Mundungus, Moody, Dumbledore - all the deaths and all the failures erased. This kitchen is only the place where Draco offered himself to Harry across the tabletop, with the marks of the last two days displayed baldly on his skin in the clear light from the window, and Harry gently parted his thighs and accepted. </p><p>
  <b>6.48pm</b>
</p><p>The last half hour is excruciating.</p><p>At six forty eight and seventeen seconds, Draco walks through the door. He moves cautiously into the dining room and pauses. One glance at the unrepaired bedroom window and another at Harry, rising from the lounge, give him his answer. He drops his sheaf of papers onto the chair and removes the dress pin that fastens his cloak, and then Harry is on him.</p><p>It is over quickly. The formal Ministry robes, a deliberate shield, are dismantled straight away. Draco is wearily compliant this time - even his usual bad-tempered remarks fall quiet - as Harry finds himself unable to muster the patience for actual penetration and settles for pressing Draco down onto the table and thrusting against him. His left hand rakes over Draco's skin, searching, while he strokes himself with his right. Afterwards, Draco pushes him away as soon as he's recovered enough to stand securely. "Lovely," he mutters. The bathroom door thuds closed. Apparently Draco lacks the depth of feeling even to slam it.</p><p>Harry moves the Ministry papers onto the ground and sprawls in the one free couch. </p><p>"Good day?" he demands when Draco emerges from the bathroom wearing a white shirt that hangs down to his bare thighs and gives him an air of martyrdom. </p><p>"Not exactly." </p><p>He casts one disgusted glance at the bourbon bottle teetering on a book on the back of the other couch and instead sits on the rug in front of it. With his legs bent up and his damp hair swept back, he couldn't do a better impression of injured fragility and this too Harry feels as a personal attack. Shame creeps up on him in these moments. </p><p>"Is that all you can say about it?" he snaps.</p><p>"I've left the Ministry," Draco tells him without looking up.</p><p>Harry gives something between a grunt and a cough and tries to make it sound disinterested. Then he says, "Great. So you can sit around here all day. Just like me. That'll be a laugh."</p><p>Draco looks around the room full of debris as if he has never seen it before. He doesn't need to shake his head.</p><p>"Then you'll go to Arles." </p><p>"Perhaps." Draco looks tired. His shoulders are hunched. "Perhaps Arles."</p><p>With his pale eyes, he can take on an expression so distant and fathomless that only Dumbledore himself could ever match it. </p><p>"What does that mean? Draco! What the hell does that mean?"</p><p>"Or perhaps not," Draco sighs. The expression he shoots at Harry begs him to push just one inch further, so he does.</p><p>"Well you can dream about it all you want. But you can't work at that place. Whichever way you cut it, consorting with Death Eater sympathisers is a breach of your terms of surrender."</p><p>"Terms!" The word explodes. For the first time, Draco's face lights up. "There are no fucking terms! I kept my side of it months ago. What sort of idiot would take the sort of terms you offer anyway?" His sneer indicates the whole of the room, and the house, and their separate lives.</p><p>Harry is captivated by the way that anger makes the tendons in Draco's neck and wrists go so tight you could pluck them like violin strings. The words wash over him. "But since you raise the question of terms, name one single thing you've done in compensation for the times I put my life on the line on a daily fucking basis for your cause. And not some shadowy promises, I mean something that might have done me good. Oh no. No rewards, no recognition. Only all this fucking mercy - it makes me sick! Fuck it - you should've been the one signing terms."</p><p>The emphatic sweep of his arm nudges the couch and brings the bourbon bottle toppling down. It rolls to the back of the cushion and leaks aromatically. Harry thinks of the scraps of scorched newspaper sitting in the kitchen sink and all the spotless studios to be rented in Arles. </p><p>"What terms then?" he says recklessly. It is hard to say which of them is more surprised to hear it. "You want terms? Give me a list. Tell me what they are."</p><p>"What? I can hardly-"</p><p>"Go on. If you want what you say you want."</p><p>Draco stares at him, hard. </p><p>"Fine." There is a long pause. "Terms then. I should have done this properly the first time. Should have got it in writing." Draco fishes out some paper from among the debris on the couch and a quill, which he licks to wet the ink. The quill hovers over the page. He scrawls. "For a start," he says as Harry holds out his hand for the paper. </p><p>Beside point number one, it says, scored angrily into the page with the quill-point, "I promise to fucking think before I act". There is a long gap to accommodate more terms, then a signature line.</p><p>"Okay," Harry tells him, worried that any more specific conditions will be beyond him.</p><p>Draco looks wrong-footed. "Sign it then," he says. Harry considers. It's an easy enough promise to fulfill. He'd need a thirty-hour day to think about Draco more than he does already. He fishes out a ballpoint from the mess and signs. Then he flips over the sheet and writes on the other side. Draco accepts it suspiciously as he hands it back. </p><p>"Harry!" he says in a last-straw sort of voice when he reads it. It says "I promise not to leave". After that is written "ever" in capital letters, then in an odd conciliatory gesture struck out. Draco looks at the paper a long time, as if the pressure of his gaze might change what is written there. </p><p>"Now you sign it," Harry says. </p><p>They both startle at the tone he uses. It has a quality of command which has been absent for many months. </p><p>Draco leans back to lay his head on the seat of the couch. It's a gesture of frustration, but it makes his throat and the delicate points of his collarbone rise up from the white shirt. If he had to choose one memory of Draco to carry away with him, Harry thinks it would be a moment like this. Unguarded and obliviously beautiful. With no-one to see him but Harry. </p><p>There is a twinge of pain behind his sternum. It suprises him to find there's something still alive down there. </p><p>"Sign it," he repeats but Draco just closes his eyes. </p><p>Behind the firm tone, Harry finds himself gripped by fear. There are two possible futures before him now, and one of them does not have Draco in it. It comes to him that, of all the vague and unlikely plans he has made as he drowsed in the armchair or lay awake in the early morning, Draco is the keystone of every single one. He craves solitude and has spent months creating a wasteland around himself to achieve it, but Draco is meant to be part of that solitude. </p><p>Everything hinges on what he does next. Harry quells the useless panic and forces his body into action. He kneels by the lounge. If there was a time he'd worked up the patience to find out where Draco most liked to be touched, and how, Harry can't remember it. He settles for the exposed length of his throat, just above his Adam's apple, and kisses it lightly. As he draws back, Draco's muscles have stretched tenser still. He flicks open the first button of Draco's shirt and slides his lips lower.</p><p>"Like to guess what I'm thinking?" he asks in a strange, shaky voice as he plucks open more buttons until finally he can see the pulse hammering in Draco's chest. Draco's lips draw forbiddingly tight. He puts his hands on Draco's shoulders and leans in awkwardly to kiss the side of his neck and run his lips into the hair behind Draco's ear.</p><p>Draco draws breath to speak but Harry's hand moves too quickly and the fingertips brushing over his nipple turn his words into a low growl. Harry bends and runs the flat of his tongue over the exposed nipple; Draco sucks in a painful breath and drops his forearm over his eyes. Harry does it again, takes the swelling flesh gently between his dry lips and sucks it and uses the edge of his teeth and the flat of his tongue until he can feel Draco's breath in his hair. "You know what I'm thinking now, right?" he breathes as he trails his hand down to Draco's stomach and finds it hard, the skin still damp. </p><p>"What?" Draco grinds out. </p><p>Harry draws back a little, groping for words. "I'm thinking that the rug is going to rip my knees to shreds." Draco looks unimpressed. "And I'm thinking I need to find a way to get you to the bed without giving you the chance to cool down and change your mind." Mindful of that, he leans back in to lick his way down Draco's sternum, disposing of the last of the buttons and pushing the shirt back to expose the naked length of him beneath. Harry's voice gets breathless. "I'm thinking I can't do this much longer without putting my hands on you. And I'm thinking I don't know what I'd do if you left."</p><p>He plants his palms in the rug and leans down to run his nose down the length of Draco's thigh and back again. Finally Draco's fingers seize his hair. He resists their rough grip and leaves four bites in a trail up Draco's thigh. "So sign it," Harry whispers, his words stirring the hair around Draco's answering arousal. "Because I can't think any more."</p><p>He can't even move in the silence that follows. It has never occurred to him before that there could be a last time. The past nine months are wrecked with lost chances. He lays his cheek against Draco's thigh and breathes in the smell of him.</p><p>"Stay still," Draco says irritably. Harry hears the crackle of parchment above him and feels it being laid against his back. The point of the quill moves across it, making him shiver. Then Draco tosses the note and quill onto a pile of Prophets on the lounge. He doesn't know what Draco has written - perhaps "D Malfoy": big and fat and curlicued with the plunge of the "y" trailing down Harry's spine. Or an alias, a meaningless scribble. It's written into Harry's skin, whatever it is. </p><p>Draco's face, when Harry straightens, is noncommittal again. Harry lifts one slender calf so he can slide beneath it, working his way gently between Draco's legs until their bodies come together and he has one thigh hooked over his hip. Draco watches him coolly, but there is no hiding the arousal that stiffens between them as Harry's hand makes a slow journey from Draco's knee, caressing the outside of his thigh, running his knuckles round the inside of Draco's hip, brushing the tip of his cock then flattening over his stomach and up to his chin. Harry pulls him into a kiss. It's brief, and after it the hot, nervous breath lingers between their mouths. </p><p>"Slow as you like," Harry says softly. "Any way you want. Plenty of time for thinking."</p><p>With eyes closed in blind faith, he leans in again. After an interminable pause, he meets a hard ridge of jaw; it slides through his lips as Draco brings their mouths together. The thinking is done with. Draco kisses him angrily now, with his hands scrabbling at Harry's shoulders and his thighs straining apart to bring their cocks together. When that proves impossible, he pushes Harry back onto the rug and climbs into his lap, knees braving the burn of wool on either side of Harry's hips. He kisses as if his aim is to break open Harry's jaw and he uses his teeth. </p><p>Harry can't remember Draco so abandoned and fierce. It smothers him under a wave of lust. His cock aches with the need to get hard again but even Draco's impatient grip can't manage that. He has wasted too much time in fantasy today. He pulls Draco's hand away.</p><p>The room is full of the sound of them - the wet slick of Draco's mouth and his gasping, growling breath. Harry tries to watch him as they kiss, while his hands grope over Draco's back and thighs and into his arse, trying to possess every inch of flesh at once. Draco's legs are trembling and his cock is wet as he ruts against Harry's stomach. Harry grips him around the back of the neck and forces their mouths together and at the same time he wraps his fingers around Draco's cock. With a startled murmur, Draco stops still. Then as Harry's hand begins to move, he falls into the rhythm. His tongue jerks in Harry's mouth. His knees grip like pincers. When Draco comes, Harry's jawbone echoes with a moan that barely reaches his ears. </p><p>As Draco pulls back, his face is turned obliquely so that all Harry can see is his shadowed eyes and gasping, swollen lips. But his hands clasp tight behind Harry's neck and hold him up as the shudders continue to run through him. When he is spent and still light-headed, Harry pulls Draco's head down onto his shoulder and holds it there until the resistance goes out of him. He lays his palms over Draco's ribs to follow his breathing as it finally starts to ease. </p><p>There was one morning, the last morning at Grimmauld Place, when he woke to the full weight of Draco stretched out on top of him and the gentle persuasion of Draco's mouth on his. The rhythm of his tongue and the rolling of his hips and the unwashed smell of his hair felt so familiar that Harry could convince himself that everything apart from the coupling of their bodies was an illusion. His palm had never curled around a wand or gripped a dead boy's wrist or cast a curse that killed; it was made to fit just so around the spur of Draco's hipbone. All the past profanities his mouth had shaped were washed away by Draco's lazy kisses. Even the scar on his forehead was veiled by white hair. </p><p>This is no small thing that Draco does for him. Draco's body is the world that Harry lives in. The dunes of his ribs and the ridge of his jaw and the lowlands of his stomach are the only terrain that Harry cares to put his foot upon. </p><p>Harry's arms tighten and lock. Draco draws a deep breath and lets it out. Harry's world drifts into stillness and he closes his eyes. </p><p>*<br/>end</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Etude: A Lesson in Voice</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Tuesday morning, dawn. </b>
</p><p>Harry rouses from slumber, as he usually does, when Draco wakes and gets out of bed. On a good day, he scratches himself idly as he follows the sounds of Draco's morning ritual. He listens to the changing volume of the shower - the loud splatter when Draco's lathering hands catch a burst of water and drop it, or the quiet spray when he puts his face right up near the showerhead to rinse his hair, and, sometimes, the silence that indicates he has stopped to scrutinise himself in the mirror. On a bad day, Harry just pulls the pillow over his head and longs for the moment he is alone in the house. </p><p>On this day, after no more than a couple of minutes, Draco returns from the bathroom and slips back into bed.  </p><p>Harry's eyes open wide, staring at the dark room. Then he remembers. An immense feeling of dread grows in his belly, but there is nothing he can do and nowhere he can be except here. Solitude, his last and most treasured possession, has been taken from him.</p><p>He waits for Draco to sleep again, conscious of the heat of his alien presence a few inches from his back. Harry holds himself very still. The folded piece of paper under his pillow would crackle if he moved.</p><p>
  <b>Early Thursday afternoon, three days afterwards. </b>
</p><p>Not far away, Draco is re-arranging the kitchen, as he has been doing for the best part of the morning. He has spent a long time on the plates and bowls, trying different piles in different configurations to fit them better in the tall, narrow cupboard, and they clatter frequently in frustration. </p><p>Unaccustomed to daytime noise, Harry rolls to the far side of the bed, away from the bedroom door which Draco has very pointedly left open, and which Harry knows he cannot close without letting down the barrier of feigned sleep.</p><p>His mind is sluggish from so long in bed, but he focuses it with sudden determination. He thinks of the first time he put his mouth on Draco's cock, in the bus station in Bristol, barricaded in the disabled toilet in the eerie quiet of late evening. It was in that interminable wait before they found the last Horcrux. Draco, still feverish from the Mark he'd been unable, in the end,  to avoid, leaned against the wall with his shoulder wedged against the hand-dryer, while Harry bit his neck and pushed the sleeve back from the spoiled black flesh on his arm. One-handed, Harry dealt with the fastenings on Draco's trousers and slipped his hand into his underpants, stroking impatiently. </p><p>As Draco turned his face toward the hand-dryer, he looked pale and drawn in the fluorescent light - hopeless, as if the battle were already lost and he was simply shuffling along until the formal defeat when he would be relieved of the burden of further struggle. Since his change of allegiance, even with all the unexpected compromises it entailed, he had never til now looked as if he wasn't going to make it. Harry's faith at that moment was too fragile to admit doubt. He pinned Draco's wrist against the bare concrete wall and licked the skin over the Mark, slow and flat-tongued. Then, holding Draco's gaze, he lowered himself to his knees.</p><p>Although he guessed from a few habitual gestures and oblique comments that Draco had some experience with other men, his instant stillness disclosed that this was something new. His mouth fell open as Harry slowly eased his pants down. He only had to run his lips over the soft head of Draco's cock to see it twitch and fill out quickly, rising as Harry continued to encourage it with his tongue. He laid his hands over the knotted muscles of Draco's abdomen to feel the gentle, helpless thrusts he was making already. Then he sucked his lips to wet them and experimentally closed his mouth around Draco's cock. The trembling in Draco's muscles made Harry needy and reckless. He slid his lips noisily back and forward along the silky shaft as Draco's fingers hesitantly touched the back of his head, growing rougher and more desperate as Harry sucked. </p><p>Harry brings himself off remembering that moment: the strangled sound Draco made when he came, the spurt of semen hitting the roof of his mouth. This is a scene he rarely brings to mind, and the memory is so fresh and vivid that he comes hard, shuddering, into the sheets. He turns his face into the pillow, with his blood singing in his ears and the taste of Draco's come on his tongue. </p><p>As the dizziness of orgasm clears, an unwelcome realisation hits him. He can tell from the quality of the silence that Draco is standing in the bedroom doorway. No words are spoken. The door closes between them and the room falls back into darkness.  </p><p>
  <b>Wednesday evening, nine days afterwards. </b>
</p><p>Their daily rhythm slowly rearranges itself to accommodate Draco's presence. Harry spends most of the day in bed, and in the dead of night wanders out with a blanket to sit on the couch. He digs out an old radio that one of the Weasleys gave him for a forgotten birthday and tunes it to Muggle stations that play mostly music with few human interruptions. The excruciating build-up caused by Draco's daytime absence has gone, along with the explosive need it produced. Instead, he wants Draco quietly, all day, every day, except when he manages the anaesthesia of sleep. Unsatisfied need becomes a habit, as he watches Draco sort through those old copies of the Prophet and tear out the occasional article, or listens to the sounds of Draco rinsing dishes in the kitchen sink and pictures his nimble hands glistening with water as they move. He learns to make the most of the times when Draco goes out to fetch groceries, or the early morning when he is in deep sleep. He wanks on the couch, in the bathroom, in the bed, and Draco pretends not to notice. </p><p>On this particular Wednesday, Harry is sprawled on the couch in the early evening gloom, where he has been since Draco went out just after midday. The satisfaction of solitude is wearing off now, and he is conscious of a distant worry growing deep in his gut. Draco doesn't usually leave him alone this long. His concern is more than just the fear that Draco no longer needs the feeble protection Harry's presence once offered him. Last night, he woke to the gentle squeeze of Draco's fingers between his legs. On top of everything else, the uninvited intimacy panicked him and he shoved Draco's hand away. Though this isn't the first such occurrence, he still has no idea whether Draco was acting in the impulse of sleep, or in full consciousness. </p><p>Another hour goes by, the familiar impatience for Draco's return souring into something much bleaker. By the time the room falls dark, he is too wound up to soothe himself with another wank.</p><p>Finally, he hears Draco's distinctive tread on the stairs, leaping up them two at a time. Draco stops in the doorway wearing a look that says "Doing nothing <i>again?</i>", even though his mouth never utters the unforgivable words. He turns on the light and deposits the bags he is carrying on the clean edge of the table. One of them smells like lamb kebabs. Harry watches him draw out three books, place them in a pile, and rearrange the rest of the debris to make space for plates. The heaps of old paper on the table are ordered now, and he consults them authoritatively before combining them into taller stacks. His presence in the room is like a bright insect, quick-moving and distracting. The cramp in Harry's stomach eases. </p><p>"I ran into your friend Weasley at Flourish and Blotts," Draco says without taking his eyes off the papers. Draco became quite a good liar in the last months of the war; Harry can't begin to guess whether the meeting was or wasn't accidental. "He asked how you were." Harry ignores the careful pause designed to give him the chance to make this into a conversation. </p><p>"His brother's in town - the one who played Seeker. They're both staying at the Owl and Toad in Greenwich." </p><p>A shiver of foreboding runs up Harry's spine: that's very close by. He's not sure, but Draco seems to be shifting around documents he's moved once or twice already.</p><p>"I said I'd take you round for a drink tonight. After dinner." There is a belligerent silence; he turns around, shoulders squaring defensively. "Well you don't want them here, do you?"</p><p>"Who says I want them anywhere?" Harry scowls. </p><p>Draco pauses for the length of two deep breaths. "Up to you," he shrugs. "I'm going. Dinner's in the box." </p><p>He disappears into the bathroom. After a few moments Harry hears the shower running, but for once he can't draw any comfort from the routine sounds of Draco's presence. As soon as the lamb kebabs are eaten, Draco will slip out into the hostile, judgemental world, leaving behind nothing but his unvoiced disappointment in Harry. The house, with the lingering smell of meat, will feel more like a tomb than ever. </p><p>Wisps of steam are escaping from the bathroom; since Draco began his relentless policy of leaving doors open, Harry has learned that he likes the water scorching. As Harry walks around the couch, he sees Draco's discarded clothes, freshly shed. There's a touchingly human quality in the way he has dropped them in a messy pile beside the bathroom wall, one leg of his trousers inside out, just where it peeled off his skin. It's unlike the Draco who picks up the empty crisp packets from the bedroom floor with his fingers disdainfully pinched and makes him feel so unworthy. </p><p>Two steps further and he can make out the slender white stripe of Draco's back beneath the falling water, obscured by steam. If he knew where his wand was, he'd like to turn the front door into brick along with the bedroom window and trap Draco inside with him. He doesn't need Draco to do anything in particular; he just needs him to be here.</p><p>His own clothes drop to the floor just outside the bathroom. Inside, the steam closes around him, soothing out his tension as he lays his glasses on the cabinet. Draco jumps as the shower door opens but stays where he is, with the spray hitting his eyes and mouth and his hair still dry enough to catch a cobweb of shimmering droplets in its ends. Harry's hands slip onto the outside of his ribs, which strain with a sudden indrawn breath. He slides them down Draco's flank, caressing his hips and stomach, breaking up the stream of water that runs over his belly and parts around his cock. Lingeringly, he traces around the inside of Draco's hipbones where the flesh is so thin he can feel the skeleton smooth as marble beneath his fingers. Answering the needy tilt of Draco's body, he moves forward until he has Draco's back pressed into his chest and his cock hardening quickly against Draco's arse. </p><p>Draco lets his head fall back over Harry's shoulder and shudders as Harry's fingers graze his nipple. He asks no questions. As always, he doesn't seek to negotiate the terms of their coupling. He merely arches into Harry's fingers as they stroke the underside of his shaft, gently up and down and up and down again, then finally close around it. With his mouth buried in Draco's neck, Harry feels the growl of frustration he refuses to let out. Harry doesn't rush. His arms are full of Draco - naked and aroused and <i>present</i> - and he plans to keep it that way as long as he can. It's hard to keep his fingers loose, though, when Draco writhes against him and sinks one desperate hand into Harry's hair. He drags the pad of his thumb over the slit, making Draco's cock twitch against his hand, then goes back to gentle, indulgent fondling.</p><p>"Harry," Draco whispers urgently and grinds back against Harry's erection. That and the steam are making Harry's head spin. He tightens his grip and sinks his teeth into Draco's neck and strokes him with long, rough tugs until he comes with an unwilling cry, slumping slightly in Harry's arms.</p><p>Harry holds his hand in the shower-stream, watching it rinse clean. Each panting breath in Draco's lungs vibrates into Harry's chest. He rests his forehead against Draco's hair and smells the singular, familiar scent of him. </p><p>When Draco turns and lunges for Harry's mouth, Harry jerks away, shocked. It is intimacy enough to have come here; he can't open himself up to that as well. Draco's eyes go hard and bright. His mouth twists unpleasantly. But he sinks on one knee, then both, and Harry has to steady himself with his palm on the wall because it's a very long time since he let this happen. Draco kneels with the falling water turning his beautiful hair darker and flatter, a breath away from Harry's cock. Just when he thinks the caress of the water and Draco's hungry gaze might be enough to undo him, Draco's mouth opens and takes him in. Everything Draco does is erotic to Harry: the demure angle of his knees closed together on the shower floor; the tentative touch of his hand at the back of Harry's thigh. He's not sucking very hard or deep but he doesn't have to. A good half of Harry's fantasies involve Draco going down on him. The real thing pulls him helplessly into climax, balls tightening  as he spills into Draco's mouth. </p><p>Draco's eyes flick open and look up at him, blinking back the splashing water. Harry flinches. Orgasm is a wholly private moment; the invasion of sharing it is more than he can stand. He staggers out of the shower, dripping water over the floor, and snatches Draco's dressing gown from the hook behind the bedroom door. Wrapped in it, he sinks onto the bed and puts his hand between his legs until the last spasms of pleasure have gone through him. As he shudders through it, he thinks of the arm that Draco left immobile in his lap as he sucked; the same arm Harry had put his mouth over, again and again, through the days at Grimmauld Place, as if the touch of his lips could suck out the black smear under the skin.</p><p>
  <b>Late Wednesday evening, nine days afterwards. </b>
</p><p>"Not until the next break," Harry insists, with his shoes lying on the rug in front of him and the roots of his hair still damp. "I want to know what that song was."</p><p>"Which song?" Draco asks flatly. </p><p>"That one."</p><p>He glares at the radio with his chin on his knees, immobile. Draco rises and puts on his coat.</p><p>From the front door, he issues his ultimatum: "It has to be now, Harry. We're half an hour late already."</p><p>"Not yet," Harry says emphatically and wraps his arms tighter around his knees. </p><p>Draco's jaw tilts out for an instant, like he is going to insist and say "You owe it to me, Harry". Harry prays he doesn't say "Do it for me, Harry" because it's true, he would do anything to keep Draco, anything up to and including cutting off his hand or throwing himself in front of a train, but he doesn't think he can do this. </p><p>He doesn't want to go to the Owl and Toad because he doesn't want to see them. He doesn't want to see them see him. Seeing them seeing him, seeing what's he's done and what it's done to him, he will lose control of his legs and they will turn and run. Conversation will be impossible: <i>So, Harry. What have you been doing since ... err ...?</i> And besides, it's none of their business. After everything he's had to do, he's entitled to be selfish, isn't he? He's sacrificed eight years of his life. Now that he's free, it's amazing how humble his desires are. All he wants is two simple things: everyone to leave him in peace, and Draco.</p><p>"I want to stay in tonight," he says stubbornly. </p><p>Draco shoots him a furious look. He is turning the doorknob when he sees what Harry is doing, then he freezes with his eyes locked on Harry's fingers unfastening the top buttons of his shirt. Harry can't meet his gaze, but decisively he plucks open the buttons at his cuffs and pulls the shirt over his head. Draco guides the door closed. </p><p>Resting with a knee on the couch between Harry's legs, Draco reaches out to touch his bare skin. Harry feels as vulnerable as if Draco had knives for fingernails, sliding along his ribs, tracing the outline of his diminished pectoral muscles, teasing his nipples into swollen knots. He has no patience for this sort of game playing. What he's in the mood for is a good hard fuck, and that last part he says aloud before he can censor himself. </p><p>"Tell me, Harry," Draco leans down and speaks in his ear, the nervous stiffness smoothing into something more sultry. "Where do you want it? How?"</p><p>And that's so much like something he might say in one of Harry's fantasies that Harry responds with instant, throaty need, blurting out, "I want you on the bed with your legs wide open and your ankles behind your ears." </p><p>Draco gasps into his ear and bites it hard - the ridged part that isn't made for biting. "What are you waiting for?"</p><p>By the time Harry reaches the bedroom, Draco is wearing nothing but his underpants. Beneath them, his erection shamelessly juts. Harry slides them down his legs and gives Draco's cock a possessive squeeze, which makes him shudder and turn his face into Harry's neck.</p><p>As Draco spreads himself out on the bed, Harry remembers what an intimate act it is to make him ready for penetration, and he recoils from it. Instead, he crawls between Draco's legs and, with his trousers shoved down to his knees, grinds their hips together, rough and filthy and searingly good. It's not so bad for Draco to kiss him like that. With all his attention focussed on his cock, he barely notices the lush mouth under his or the insistent hands holding his head still. He makes Draco come first, arching his head back and breaking their mouths apart. Later, as Draco's fingers close around him, he tilts his head to get his mouth on Draco's neck and by the time he comes hard over Draco's stomach, Draco is wearing a chain of red welts that will need thorough attention before he can slip off to the Owl and Toad without facing some leering questions. </p><p>Fucking on the bed seems somehow quaint and old-fashioned. When Draco pushes a pillow under his head, drags a blanket over them and curls up beside him, making no greater demands than a hand resting over his spent cock, he thinks maybe he can live with it.</p><p>
  <b>Thursday morning, twelve days afterwards.</b>
</p><p>Into Harry's sluggish, slow-moving dreams, Draco's voice drifts. The pitch of it and the mannered, rounded vowels are familiar, but the cadence tugs at his conscious thought. It's different. Commanding. Careful. Draco is doing magic. In the defencelessness of sleep, Harry feels a wave of tenderness come over him. His dream shifts. They're at Hogwarts again. A Transfiguration lesson, in a seventh year where the war had never come. He watches Draco turning a frog into a silk glove and knows that, after the lesson, he'll take Draco into the Room of Requirement and draw his wand-hand up to his lips. </p><p>Harry wakes to bright light and jerks up in bed. </p><p>One whole wall of the bedroom is gone - the one with the bricked-over window. Light is pouring into the room and outside he can see the street, the two girls sitting on their front stairs across the road and the old man in purple robes walking his two black Crups. Strangers. Unwelcome strangers, piercing his privacy.</p><p>"It's all right," Draco says behind him.</p><p>It's not all right.. It's very fucking far from all right. It's like a violation and a robbery and a kick in the face all in one. The room's furniture looks foreign in the bright light. His trunk is covered in dust and insect carcasses. The still air tells him the wall is still there, but it's transparent: its protection has been torn away from him and all his familiar things are changed.</p><p>"Harry," Draco says again, and crawls over the bed and rests his chin on Harry's shoulder. "It's all right. No-one can see in. The spells only work from this side." He rests his hand on the blanket over Harry's thigh. His hair brushes softly against Harry's ear and cheek. The shirt that hangs loose around his wrist is an old Cleansweep t-shirt of Harry's. Harry remembers wearing it that time they met on Parliament Hill, just before Draco took the Mark, when he had sat on that park bench stiff and prickly with badly disguised terror and Harry had blurted out all their plans for the last Horcrux in order to avoid voicing the stupid thing he felt strongest, which was the urge to tear Voldemort's throat out there and then, plans be damned.</p><p>Harry closes his eyes to block out the light. The tip of Draco's nose settles against his neck.</p><p>Draco murmurs, gripping his elbow hard, "I'm not changing it back. You'll have to live with it." </p><p>"Like hell I will," Harry mutters.</p><p>Harry shrugs him off and retreats back under the blankets. Draco slips into bed beside him and says nothing, does nothing, simply stays. Later, when perhaps he thinks that Harry has fallen asleep, he strokes the hair back from Harry's temple, behind his ear and down along his neck. Harry is too weighed down with helplessness and defeat to stop him. </p><p>
  <b>Tuesday morning, nineteen days afterwards. </b>
</p><p>Their quotidian pattern changes subtly. Because the light prevents him sleeping beyond mid-morning, Harry spends more time out of bed. A few days of his bristling resentment convince Draco to find a reason to be out of the house until early afternoon, when Harry is usually hungry enough to appreciate his return with sandwiches or pizza and, on two or three adventurous days, a bottle of wine. </p><p>In the enforced brightness, it's harder to seal his eyes against the present and sink into reminiscence. He takes to reading Draco's books, whichever volume bears a current bookmark, and replacing them with a page corner turned down. He gets a good way through the historical adventure set in the bloody post-Merlin power struggle, because it's so distant in time that he can't bring himself to care about the ending. With a painful effort, he cuts his hair back to the nape of his neck, forces himself into the shower every day and applies his razor every second.</p><p>Then one morning he trudges out in his pyjama bottoms, his lips cracked and his throat raw from the night before, to find lying on the kitchen bench a thick cream coloured envelope with French writing on the front. His heart tries to drag down out of his chest. He can't make his feet approach the dreadful object. He turns the lounge room upside down trying to find his wand and makes a complete wandless hash of the bedroom wall which leaves it perforated and seeping but no longer letting in light.</p><p>Later, when Draco opens the door warily with a bowl of soup, he's as hurtful as he knows how to be. Draco's response is none too gentle either. </p><p>"Are you determined to spend the rest of your pathetic life alone?" Draco spits at him in conclusion. "You can't have a fucking meltdown every time something changes. You are not worth that."</p><p>That's a breach of the main unspoken rule in this house, and he knows it. It is forbidden to draw attention to any of the symptoms of Harry's malaise. Harry thought that point had been made abundantly clear the time Draco brought home the business card of that advice witch at St Mungo's and set off the argument which climaxed in the only occasion where Harry has ever struck him. </p><p>"Did I fucking ask you to?" Harry says hoarsely, as if this weren't the house Draco inherited from his father that Harry had come to spend a night in, almost nine months ago. "Did I? Fuck you."</p><p>This time, Draco doesn't leave the door open when he leaves. Harry's grateful. His throat and his chest are clenched up so tight that a despicable whimpering sound threatens to spill out every time he breathes. </p><p>
  <b>Wednesday, twenty-four days afterwards.</b>
</p><p>On the mornings when Draco pulls things out of the cupboards, sorts out the piles in the hallway, and starts putting it all into boxes, Harry takes refuge in the bedroom. On the first day, Harry throws a mug at him when he opens the door, hard enough to shatter into splinters and keep him out for the whole day and night. On the second day, he pulls Draco onto the bed and subjects him to the sort of brutally thorough handjob that leaves him wrapping himself around Harry's body, panting and begging. The subsequent days fall somewhere in between.</p><p>The house is full of stacked boxes. Only the kitchen cupboards remain to be emptied. </p><p>
  <b>Friday afternoon, twenty-six days afterwards.</b>
</p><p>On the day the last of the boxes is taped shut and Draco's trunk filled to the top, Harry drags himself onto the couch which, mercifully, is still exactly where it has always been. Draco is absent. Harry pulls his glasses off and lets them fall onto the floor so he can't see the stacks of boxes, piled cruelly neat, just as Draco would have liked this place to be kept all the time.</p><p>He is still there an hour later when Draco opens the front door with a set of folded maps in his hand. Draco gives him a long look that is probably disgust and goes into the kitchen.</p><p>Harry puts his head on his knees and holds himself together. Draco is not going to see him cry. He doesn't cry any more, in any case. Even on that first day at Grimmauld Place when he could still hear the wet crunch of breaking bones in his ears, he hadn't cried. But then, he hadn't needed to. He'd had Draco to reach for every time the memory came too close. </p><p>He blinks quickly and looks up. The ceiling is a long way away and the stripped room looks pitifully bare. He won't budge from this house. When Draco has gone for good, he'll throw the last of the boxes out the window. Even the radio is an unnecessary distraction. All he needs is the couch and the bed, and he can spend his days lost in fantasy with Draco's body almost as real as if he were physically present. In fact, he remembers, fantasy comes without complications. The needs of his fantasy Draco are obvious and always within his power to satisfy. Nonetheless, if he can find the carton with Draco's discarded clothes in it, he might retrieve a shirt or a tie before he chucks it. </p><p>As Draco comes back into the room, looking displeased, Harry thinks the only surprise is that it took him so long to make up his mind to leave. His eyes are as grey and neat and blank as the cardboard boxes. What on earth must he see when he looks at Harry?  </p><p>"Have you packed?" Draco demands.</p><p>Harry wraps his arms tighter around his legs. He's going to stay here, on this couch. Draco can do whatever he likes. It's stupid to care about people anyway. They're unreliable. <i>Things,</i> like the couch, like the bed, they stay where they're meant to stay and never trip you up.</p><p>"Of course not," Draco sighs. "What did I expect?"</p><p>Harry glances to the floor for his glasses to cover up his naked eyes. It's Draco who summons them and hands them to him. As he slips them on, he sees the new object in Draco's hand: the envelope from the kitchen. He lunges at it and tries to rip it in half but it's just too thick.</p><p>"Stop that," Draco snarls, fingernails digging into Harry's wrist. "It's time you had the balls to open it."</p><p>Draco turns the envelope upside down and shakes the contents onto the couch: a legal document and two rectangles of cardboard. Harry glances at the two smaller papers, the blood draining out of his face. His ribs feel locked together like the jaws of a trap.</p><p>"No!" he says faintly, breaking a very long silence. "No, Draco! I can't speak French."</p><p>Draco stands over him and tells him it doesn't matter: the locals will speak English for Harry Potter and in any case, the language is easy to learn. He adds, "What is there to keep you in England?"</p><p>Harry stares at the two train tickets with the French towns listed on them. "I can't."</p><p>"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Draco explodes, shoving Harry's shoulder so hard he has to straighten his legs to stay upright. "You've got a fucking hide saying that to me! I was <i>there,</i> Harry. I saw the fortress on Drear after the fight you had. What was it - four Death Eaters? Five? I heard Greyback howling and licking his wounds for two days after you dealt with him. And that church where you wiped out the Dark Lord, I even went to see what was left of it - you didn't know that, did you? So don't fucking well tell me what you can't do!"</p><p>Harry has little enough left under his control; he won't give up his certainties so easily. "No," he repeats obstinately. "I can't."</p><p>Draco tries another angle, his voice getting higher and tighter with desperation. "All right then. I'll ship all the furniture over. The house I found is about the same size. I can recreate this whole ugly room for you if it means that much to you. And let's face it, as long as you don't go past the front door, you'll never know which bloody country you're in." </p><p>Harry turns his head away as if slapped. </p><p>"I'm not trying to stop you," he spits. "Go if you want to."</p><p>Draco stares at him hard for a long while, then gives up and slumps on the couch next to him. "I will go alone if I have to," he says, sounding frustrated to the point of tears. "I will."</p><p>Harry kicks miserably at the other document from the envelope that has fallen on the floor. It looks like a lease. There are two copies pinned together, and Draco has signed both with his official signature: the one with the flourish of elongated consonants. It reminds Harry of the other document Draco signed for him almost a month ago, using only his first name, that has slipped from under Harry's pillow to land somewhere behind the bedhead. His spine tightens as if feeling the point of the quill moving over it again.</p><p>He thinks he can maybe keep Draco in England if he wants to, despite all this. After all, they are scarcely nineteen and it's slightly ridiculous to imagine they can set up house in a foreign country. Seeing the way Draco's fingers rub hard across the bridge of his nose, he thinks it may even be easy to keep him here. </p><p>"You did promise not to leave."</p><p>Draco snaps back in a very tight voice: "What you seem to be determined not to notice is that I am making a conspicuous and frankly exhausting effort not to leave you." He picks up one of the tickets, bending it between thumb and forefinger, holds it at arm's length and stares at it. His sigh has more than an edge of regret. He continues, sounding drained, "I'm going to Arles, Harry. If you won't move, then maybe I can come back and visit every now and then. The archive is closed two days a week."</p><p>Harry's face goes numb with dread. He can imagine all too well what his weeks would look like, stringing out the endless days until Draco's next visit, then too daunted by his sudden miraculous presence to do anything about it. He can picture the desolate evenings knowing Draco is opening another door, turning on another light, hanging his coat on another hook, hundreds of miles away; alone, or not.</p><p>"That's not good enough."</p><p>Draco turns to him, his head still resting against the back of the couch. "Then you know what you have to do."</p><p>Harry snatches the ticket and reads it again. The date seems very soon. The train leaves the land at Brighton, where he went on a school trip nearly half his life ago, and after that, it runs over water into unknown territory. He thinks about dull, washed out Brighton with its collapsing pier. It's a town you can stroll through and quickly forget, and be forgotten by. He thinks about steering Draco into the shadowed little side-alley where Dudley's friend Gordon snuck off for a cigarette.</p><p>"Can we get off the train?"</p><p>Draco looks startled. "If you really want to," he says cautiously. "As long as I get to Arles by the end of next week, it doesn't matter where you want to go on the way."</p><p>"I want to go back to Brighton." </p><p>Draco's face grow ugly at that statement: the wizarding community in Brighton is small and highly integrated into the Muggle town, chiefly selling curios and antique postcards. But he shrugs in the end and says, "If you like." </p><p>"I'm not learning French."</p><p>"I said you don't have to."</p><p>"And you have to keep this place empty. In case."</p><p>"Okay."</p><p>There will be more conditions, but Harry can't think of them right now. All he can think is that his body feels lighter than it has in months, the steel trap around his chest has loosened, and Draco is quietly stroking the back of his hand and resolutely not meeting his eyes. </p><p>It's done. He's given up his hermitic security. He's committed himself to the unknown - probably to disaster and failure, but at least not entirely alone. He catches Draco's fingers and holds onto them with fierce desperation. </p><p>The enormity of his decision leaves him feeling uprooted. To ground himself, he moves his hand onto Draco's thigh. Draco's face whips up toward him with a startled expression that says <i>Now?!</i> and Harry thinks: yes, now. He slides his fingers between Draco's thighs and up, and confirms that Draco is not disinterested, just surprised. Draco eases his legs apart to give Harry better access. Fuelled with released tension, perhaps, his arousal fills out quickly, then he grips Harry's wrist and draws his hand away. </p><p>Still fast-pulsed from the prospect of desertion, Harry doesn't dare evade Draco's mouth as he leans over. There's a long, deep kiss, which is mostly the work of Draco's insistent tongue. When Draco draws away, Harry seizes the back of his hair and crushes their mouths together again. He never had time to get any good at this, but he likes the breathless sounds Draco makes between kisses, and the way he unfailingly closes his eyes, and his unwitting habit of curling his hand over Harry's breastbone. </p><p>Their embrace eases into teasing, fleeting touches of lips and tongues. Draco's cool fingers slide under Harry's shirt, stroking his spine and inching down the back of his pyjama pants. As he bites gently at Harry's lower lip, one finger delves into the crease of Harry's arse</p><p>"What are you-" Harry protests, trying to twist away.</p><p>Draco's tone is defensive. "Any good reason why not?"</p><p>Harry can't think of one, so he lets Draco undress him, watching his impatient hands strip off pants and t-shirt. The old tube of lubricant is still in the bedroom dresser, and as Draco summons it, Harry wonders why it wasn't packed. Kneeling on the rug, Draco bites his lip intently as he squeezes a trail of it into his palm and coats his fingers. It strikes Harry as bizarre that the sex between them could have got so formal, a matter for bargaining and nervous silence. That terse mouth of Draco's used to laugh, once, at the window at Grimmauld Place as Harry licked his stomach and sides, searching for the most ticklish places. </p><p>Draco looks up at him, over his glistening fingers still holding the tube, and quirks his eyebrow wickedly. It goes right to Harry's cock. Without breaking their gaze, he slides his hips to the edge of the couch and raises one leg onto Draco's shoulder. Draco leans forward to bite the inside of his thigh as he works one finger into him. </p><p>The one and only time Harry let someone do this to him - and the last time Draco showed any interest in it - was at Grimmauld Place when, wide awake at 4am and feeling immortally disconnected from the future and the past, Harry had thought of it as the one new frontier they hadn't crossed. The slow, silky penetration of Draco's fingers takes him back to that night. He rocks back against Draco's hand, both of them getting bolder and rougher. He remembers how fearless he felt, after thirty-six hours with nothing he needed to do except tune his ear to the sounds Draco made when he was aroused, or frustrated, or taken by surprise. If he closes his eyes, he could be back in Grimmauld Place, oblivious to the disintegration of the last eight-and-a-half months. He could have back the invincible hope that used to come so effortlessly to him, all that time ago. Draco isn't leaving him. Draco is deliberately entwining their two lives together. Draco is taking him to France.</p><p>With his eyes closed, the wet heat of Draco mouthing the head of his cock makes him jolt in surprise. He'd forgotten how good this feels in the flesh: the sizzling pleasure in his skin and the added eroticism of vulnerability and trust. As his mouth makes all of Harry's muscles seize up, Draco's fingers hold him open. He thrusts back against Draco's hand, forcing him deeper inside, and Draco moans around his mouthful. </p><p>"Stop!" Harry hisses, on the point of losing it. He can wank for half an hour or more, holding his orgasm at bay, but with Draco here in front of him, openly wanting him, it's a whole lot harder to keep control. He pulls Draco's shirt over his head and, when he stands, tears his trousers down. Draco's cock is straining hard already. Harry coats him in lubricant, cradling his balls in his palm until Draco ruts against him in need. Then he rolls onto his knees on the couch and bends over the armrest, closing his eyes. Draco kisses the base of spine, then a few vertebrae higher, and higher still. His knuckles run down Harry's arse, testing. </p><p>Draco has been fucked often enough that he knows how to make it wrenchingly good. He eases himself with frustrating patience inside Harry, then moves in an insistent rhythm that slowly increases in speed and depth. Harry is in two places at once: here, just on the verge of leaving the country at Draco's side, and at Grimmauld Place, with the war ended and the dizzying prospect of liberty at his fingertips. The intense penetration seems to wake nerve endings he hasn't used in a long time. He burns in every place Draco's body connects with his. Draco's hand has barely closed around his cock when Harry comes over it, jaw clenched, eyes screwed shut, letting out a low moan that doesn't exactly shape a name but is a sound that no-one except Draco has ever got to hear. Later, he braces himself as Draco starts the rhythm again, faster, for his own pleasure. Harry stretches his arms and tightens his muscles against the slight discomfort. Draco is thrusting hard up into him, well beyond control, with his forehead pressed into the back of Harry's neck. His climax is everything one of Harry's fantasies would have asked for: shooting hot and hard inside him with his mouth pleading "Fuck, Harry, Harry, Harry, fuck!".</p><p>Afterwards, he lets Draco kiss him again, more hot breath and caressing tongue now that the edge of desire is taken off. In the cramped confines of the couch, their limbs get more hopelessly tangled every time they move, until they resign themselves to using nothing but their mouths. There's got to be a day or two left before the train leaves. There's virtually nothing that Harry wants to pack. Now that he's been shown a way for their two bodies to communicate again, he wants to spend every waking moment doing it. </p><p>
  <b>Tomorrow</b>
</p><p>In a little less than two days, on a crisp afternoon threatening snow, they will leave this place, Draco with both hands full of suitcases and a thick layer of glamour charms covering the fresh marks on his neck; Harry wearing a long coat with his beanie pulled down low so that only a lick of black hair shows over one cheek. </p><p>From the doorstep, Harry's gaze will flick back, past the boxes and the bare furniture, to the couch. What he will see is himself kneeling on its dreadful fringed cushions with his chin bent down to the armrest, Draco curled over him as they move together, their naked skin flushed and glistening with desire.   </p><p>Out of the entire eight months and fourteen days they have lived there, that will be the one moment he wants to take away with him. When the door closes behind them, all the rest will be sealed inside.</p><p>As Draco leads him down the stairs, Harry will let out a shuddering sigh that seems to take with it a mist of painful memories. </p><p>"Good," is all that Harry will say.</p><p>Draco will turn to him with a cautious smile that seems unbearably sweet to Harry because he can't remember whether he's ever seen it before. Harry will resist the urge to kiss him, because that's a moment to be saved for the intimacy of their onboard compartment or the threshold of their new home. </p><p>They will leave the house behind them, far behind them, as, walking down the street, their footsteps fall in time. </p><p>***</p><p>end</p><p> </p><p><i>Every heart to love will come<br/>But like a refugee.</i><br/>"Anthem", Leonard Cohen</p>
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